Electronic catalog servers, such as those associated with large e-commerce sites, often store large quantities of catalog data to which updates are frequently made. The quantity of updates received over an extended period of time, such as several months or years, may be too large to enable the updates to be conveniently managed in a single, live data store. Therefore, a portion of the stored updates may be deleted from the live data store and moved to archive storage systems.
Users and administrators of electronic catalog systems often need to access the updates made to the catalog data, for various troubleshooting or marketing purposes. In order to facilitate access to the updates, there may be live or dynamic indexing performed on the live data store. However, such dynamic indexing may affect the throughput and performance of the electronic catalog systems, and may also require increasingly larger storage space for the dynamic index over time.